Indoor coverage is a primary differentiator among wireless service provider, yet an indoor-environment is not conducive to efficient utilization of radio resources because of various factors such as path loss or attenuation, which can lead to channel quality degradation and ensuing excessive signaling which in turn can increase battery drain substantially for mobile devices operating within the indoor environment. In addition, as wireless service become ubiquitous and thus commoditized, market share of legacy telecommunication systems and service associated therewith increasingly are affected by customer attrition. Thus, various solutions such as microcells, picocells, repeaters, and femtocells have emerged to exploit legacy systems and extant broadband, non-mobile networks to provide indoor coverage.
Such solutions, particularly femtocell coverage, are likely to overlap with extant macrocell coverage to ensure service continuity as subscriber(s) enters in and exits out of the subscriber(s) home coverage area or private indoor environment. It is noted that while disparate solutions such as microcells also overlapped with macro coverage, each microcell required unique identifiers and handover relationships or associations with the underlaid macrocell sector. Yet, microcells are typically few due to cost factors limiting them to commercial applications only. In turn, femtocells are consumer products with a significant commoditization factor, e.g., low-threshold to market adoption and rapid decay or adjustment of pricing setpoints; thus, femtocell deployments are projected to be far more numerous that microcell solution(s). A substantive number, e.g., 102-105, of femtocells can reside within the wireless coverage area of a single macrocell thus creating a substantively complex handover situation for transitioning from macrocell coverage to femtocell coverage. In view of such high deployment density, handover from macrocell-to-femtocell can readily strain conventional neighbor-handling capabilities such as handover associations of macrocell networks and devices or other solutions for wireless indoor coverage.
With respect to wireless network operation and handover, conventionally, public land mobile network (PLMN) and associated mobile country code (MCC) and mobile network code (MNC) or network color code(s) (NCC(s)) are employed to determine if a mobile device is allowed to access a macrocell. However, conventional systems do not contemplate dedicated network mask code(s) that distinguishes a “public” macrocell network from a “private” femtocell network wherein a limited number of customers can access service and related radio resources in each femto access point. Conventional network operators can deploy a femto network within the same MNC and MCC network as a macro network. Accordingly, conventional systems can experience inefficient macro-to-femto handover especially in the high-density limit, e.g., 105-106 femtocells per macrocell that is expected in long-term deployments.